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The Triumph Of Foreign Adoption
| Article
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10801 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
2,803 Words |
| Author
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Fred Setterberg
Fred Setterberg is the author of The Roads Taken: Travels
through America's Literary Landscapes. |
WHEN BETTY LANING STROLLED THROUGH TOWN WITH HER TWO adopted daughters clinging to either hand, most people could tell immediately that they weren't the average family. Laning is white, and her daughters are Chinese, dispatched from a Hong Kong orphanage to West Newton, Massachusetts.
"Once," remembers Laning, "we went to buy some shoes, and we ran into these two elderly women who kept poking each other and whispering about us. One of my daughters finally said, "Don't worry, Mom. We've got it all figured out. When they come up and ask us, we'll tell them you're our white governess."'
Adoptive parents of international children know all about these kinds of situations. "Where's their real mother?" complete strangers will swagger up and ask. "Do you have any kids of your own?" demands an insensitive neighbor. "Are they really yours?" wonders most of the world.
It has been over three decades since international adoption got its start in America. With many of the nearly 200,000 children adopted from foreign shores now reaching maturity, it finally is possible to pose the only really important question: How well has international adoption worked?
Do foreign-born children thrive in their American households? And how do parents come to fully grasp the lifelong implications of forging their families across cultural, class, and racial lines?
DRIVING FORCES
Last year, Americans adopted 9,008 children from around the world. Romania, Korea, Peru, Colombia, India, and the Philippines sent the greatest number, but nobody knows which countries will emerge overnight as future leaders. Famine, natural disasters, snap revolutions, and the chronic elasticity of foreign government policies routinely turn international adoption into a revolving door of instant opportunity and sporadic heartbreak.
"People have been flocking to Romania," points out Janese Crowley, mother of children from Korea and Canada and a volunteer with Adoptive Families of America, a parent support group in Minneapolis. "Television showed all these poor children shivering in their cribs in government orphanages. That's the kind of thing that stirs people to respond."
Another key motivator is
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